Offline mode for SimCity is being “explored,” but bigger cities won’t happen

Maxis have released a new blog post on their website in which the game’s general manager, Patrick Buechner explained that an offline mode is a very realistic possibility, they’ve not quite said that it will be a reality though.

According to the blog post, Maxis currently have an entire development team “exploring” an offline mode for SimCity.

Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode. I can’t make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect.

An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience.

It’s not like an offline mode is impossible either because modders already found a way to use it in the game not too long after the game launched and had the massive server wide issues for everyone.

There is also some bad news coming from the blog though, as it has said that bigger cities won’t ever happen due to technical restraints on the game.

We’ve put months of investigation into making larger city sizes, reworking the terrain maps, changing the routing algorithms of our agent-based system and altering the way that GlassBox processes the data in a larger space.

After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities. We’ve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldn’t achieve it within the confines of the engine.

We’ve chosen to cease work on bigger city sizes and put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore an offline mode. Some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on bigger cities will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance.

The question is, are people still going to put faith in Maxis after what was such a terrible release week for them? Nothing seemed to go right and nobody could really play the game. Are you guys still interested in SimCity, and would an official offline mode bring you back into the game after a couple months away from it?